Hellenism Between Empire and Revolution Simos Zeniou
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Politics. Rivista di Studi Politici www.rivistapolitics.it (5), 1/2016, 71-88 @ Editoriale A.I.C. - Edizioni Labrys All right reserved ISSN 2279-7629 “Dividuous waves of Greece:” Hellenism between Empire and Revolution Simos Zeniou Abstract This article proposes a reading of P. B. Shelley’s lyrical drama Hellas as a critical encounter with early nineteenth century philhellenic discourse. This reading challenges, therefore, the still prevalent understanding of Shelley as an archetypal idealizing philhellenist. By reading Hellas in the context of Shelley’s manifold engagements with classical and modern Greece and by examining the subversive deployment of the “westering” theme in the lyrical parts of the work, I argue: 1) that Shelley draws attention to the appropriation of Hellenism by hegemonic political and cultural discourses of the period and to its entanglement with imperial politics; 2) that the chorus’s gradual recognition of the historical situatedness of its discourse simultaneously resists its wholesale subsumption under Eurocentric universalism and retains a utopian, future-oriented Hellenism as a guide for radical politics. Keywords P.B. Shelley - Romantic Hellenism - Greek War of Independence - Westering - Universalism I When Percy Bysshe Shelley chooses Aeschylus’s Persae as the model and intertextual referent for his lyrical drama Hellas (1821), he is opting for a text that has exerted considerable influence on the formation of a distinct European identity over and against the Asiatic other1. Critics and scholars have long acknowledged Aeschylus’s representation of the consequences of hubris at Xerxes’s court, accompanied by the cultural and literary topoi of despotism, luxury, and excess, as one of the earliest instances of the polarization between Greek and barbarian and as foundational for the development of European orientalism (Said 1978, 55-57; Hall 1991, 56-100). Furthermore, Shelley selects a text that was particularly important for the emergence of modern Greek national consciousness. Gonda Van Steen has traced its circulation in 1 I am grateful to Professors James Engell, John Hamilton, Panagiotis Roilos, and Andrew Warren for detailed feedback and valuable comments on early and late forms of this article. Discussions with Valentinos Kontoyiannis, Adam Stern, and Juan Torbidoni were immensely helpful for the shaping of my 72 Politics. Rivista di Studi Politici (5), 1/2016 Greek radical circles during the early 19th century – including its recital and performance in secret meetings – and has made a compelling argument for its role as a «charter myth» in the shaping of modern Greek national ideology (Van Steen 2010, 67-108). This marked discursive background and context, combined with the philhellenic rhetoric that characterizes Hellas2, has often been used for classifying Shelley among romantic radical-liberals whose politics were defined and structured by an essentializing distinction from the oriental other. Shelley’s idealized conception of classical Greece is thus read as part and parcel of broader networks of reception and appropriation of Hellenism by the dominant political, cultural and aesthetic discourses in an era of emerging imperialism3. By assumedly equating Greek liberty and its modern revival with European political modernity, Shelley’s radicalism is seen ultimately in theoretical accord with a British foreign policy that, following George Canning’s appointment as Foreign Secretary in 1822, favored the creation of an independent Greek state under British influence in order to promote its interests in the eastern Mediterranean and to thwart Russian advances in the region4. In this article, I question this enlisting of Shelley, through the mediation of his Hellenism, under the banner of liberal imperialism. I demonstrate instead, by focusing on Hellas, that Shelley puts forward a critical understanding of philhellenism – understood here both as a late 18th-early19th century scholarly, aesthetic, and political movement that affirms the centrality of classical Greece for European modernity and as the support for the Greek War of independence (1821-1829)5 – that recognizes its potential discursive implication in imperial politics. The dynamic relationship between Hellenism – in its cultural, political, aesthetic, educational but also scholarly dimensions – and imperial and colonizing policies, has been the focus of significant scholarly attention in the past decades6. My attempt here follows Phiroze Vasunia’s suggestion that Hellenism was also the ground for the articulation of an anti- imperial politics of modernity during the 19th century (Vasunia 2010, 289). More specifically, by reading Shelley against the background of British philhellenism in the argument. 2 Hellas, according to Richard Holmes’s seminal biography of Shelley, «contains the classic English statement of Philhellenism» (Holmes 2003, 678). Maria Schoina notes that Shelley’s early critical reception in Greece emphasized his philhellenism and paid particular attention to Hellas (Schoina 2008, 258-67). 3 For such readings of Shelley, and British romantic orientalism in general, see Leask 1992, Makdisi 1998, and Makdisi 2009. Recent works, such as Warren 2014, offer more nuanced readings that emphasize Shelley’s critique of Eurocentric orientalism. 4 Jerome McGann argues that the «typical philhellenist illusions» that mark the “Prologue” to Hellas «were open to political exploitation by Europe’s imperialist powers» (McGann 1983, 125). See Cunningham 1993, 188-275, for a detailed account of the vacillations of British foreign policy during the period. 5 See Espagne and Pécout 2005, 5. 6 For discussions focusing on the British context, see Stray 1998, Bradley 2010, and Hagerman 2013. Simos Zeniou 73 “Dividuous waves of Greece:” Hellenism between Empire and Revolution early 19th century – a period in which the eastern Mediterranean was a location for both radical revolutionary movements and western imperial expansionism – and by considering the appropriation of the “westering trope” in the lyrical parts of the poem, I argue that Hellas becomes a central site where Hellenism’s constitutive role in political modernity is tested and contested. Without sidestepping the undeniable ambivalence that marks Shelley’s Hellenism, I highlight its critical outlook towards European imperial history and its resistance to hegemonic uses of the ancient and classical past. II From the 17th century onwards, travel literature on Greece played a crucial role in the shaping of philhellenic ideology and sentiment as a criterion that could be applied in order to estimate the participation of modern Greeks in political and social modernity. Often taking the form of reflections and observations on the “manners” of modern Greeks, this corpus of texts is a veritable archive of testimonies that blend classical education and ethnographic fascination in their effort to detect remnants of the glorious past in modern customs, behavior, and modes of social organization. The diagnosis is – more often than not – bleak: the moral character of the Greeks was almost invariably «considered despicable and they were represented as vicious, completely devoid of any decency or virtue, and absolutely ignorant and superstitious […] servile and obsequious, vain, perfidious and cunning, invidious and intriguing, insincere, deceitful and avaricious» (Angelomatis-Tsougarakis 1990, 91-2)7. This trope of moral health or degradation acquires however a particular political inflection in the period following the French Revolution. The purported survival of the ancient Greek character in their modern descendants solidifies the latter’s claim that they form a distinct nation that can and must organize itself, with international support, into an independent, Western-type political society. The ideological potential of Hellenism was evident, for instance, in the 1797 annexation of the Ionian Islands to the First French Republic as part of Napoleonic expansionism. This annexation was accompanied by the deployment of a classicizing rhetoric in addresses to the Greek population of the islands as well as by the commissioning of ethnographical missions in the Mediterranean East by the Directory. Such efforts found their counterpart in Greek radical thought in the pre-revolutionary period. Adamantios Korais, for example, the central figure of the late Greek Enlightenment, draws explicit links between the presumed republican character of the French Revolution and the civilizing mission of French expansionism in these regions. In his Σάλπισμα Πολεμιστήριον [War Blare] 7 See also the discussion in Spencer 1954, 146-70. 74 Politics. Rivista di Studi Politici (5), 1/2016 (Korais 1801) the occupation of Egypt by the French troops does not belong to the same order as the Ottoman conquest of the country. Unlike the tyranny exerted by the latter on the «blissful land of the Ptolemies», the French conquest serves historical and cultural progress, falling upon the land «as dew from the sky, bringing to the Egyptians lights and freedom» (Κοrais 1801, 11-2, my translation)8. This shift in French policy and perceptions did not go unnoticed in British political and cultural circles. Reviews in influential journals not only refute the ethnographical accuracy of accounts that support the continuity between ancient and modern Greeks, but they comment perceptively on the political use and abuse of Hellenism, whether in its revived or in its surviving variety9. Soon though, in light of the changing character